Re-Powering The Van
Disclaimer!! I have never claimed to be an expert so this is not a how-to but rather a how-I-did-it
(This photo is looking down into the electrical compartment under the gaucho. The cushion and house batteries have been removed for now)
OK, so yeah, this is probably not the kind of re-power all you gear-heads were thinking about, but The Van, and I, feel a lot better now that I’ve pulled the $650 Tripp-Lite Inverter/Charger, that silver ribbed box in the lower left, with its 2000 Watts of inverter power and 50 amps of charge current
and replaced it with this $150, 15 amp IOTA Converter with IQ4 charge controller.
Some of y'all are going to shake your heads and wonder just what this fool is thinking, going backwards like that! And that's understandable.
But think of it in terms of a couple owning a 5-bedroom/5 ½ bath house that they only use a fraction of; oh, and by the way, the furnace needs replacing. Now think of them selling that house and replacing it with a 1 bedroom/1 bath + den bungalow that they use every room of. Setting aside all that ‘Great American Dream’ stuff that Madison Avenue has indoctrinated us with since birth, is that really going backwards, or is it intelligent asset and resource management??
OK, regardless of what you think about that scenario, before I get to the nuts and bolts of actually making the equipment switch let me run down my reasoning here. It might not change your opinion of how many marbles my jar still holds, but then again, who knows. . .
True, by giving up the Tripp-Lite inverter I no longer have access to 120V power when not hooked up to shore-power; but then again I hardly ever used the inverter anyway. In fact the inverter had far more time on it from the 15 minute monthly test/exercise it got than it ever had for real. Oh, and by the way, (See how I cleverly repeated that phrase from a couple paragra - - Oh never mind. . .) during one of those monthly tests I discovered that the inverter had failed. (Which is exactly why I’m a stickler about regular tests of things not often used. Find out before you need it!) This failure was disappointing given how few hours the inverter had been run in its 4 years of active life (Yep, a year out of warranty!) but since I didn’t use it anyway, no big deal; except that I began to suspect that the dead inverter was bleeding off a few of my incoming shore-power volts. (I won’t get into the guts of how inverters like this work other than to point out that shore-power has to be processed by the inverter before it’s passed on to the rest of the electrical system and I’m not sure all of it was being passed on.)
True, by replacing a 50 amp charger (The charger portion of the Tripp-Lite continued to work after the inverter failed.) with a puny 15 amp charger it’s going to take a bit longer to recover from a deep, or even moderate, discharge state; but, with 180 watts of solar on the roof and modest usage I don’t get into a deep-discharge situation very often, and even so, whenever I plug into shore-power it’s going to be at least 12 hours before I unplug again, so what’s the rush? In fact, fast charges put more wear and tear on batteries than modest charges, yet even with the Tripp-Lite set to low-charge-current mode in an attempt to mitigate this fast-charge stress, it still output nearly 30 amps.
True, even throttled back to low-charge mode the Tripp-Lite could easily support almost 30 amps of prolonged 12V load; but my peak 12V load is more like 10 amps, and then only when I’m trying to get it up there by running the fridge, the fantastic vent fan on high, the overhead recessed lights (So bright I call them landing lights) charging up my laptop and plugging in the 100W inverter to charge some dead double-A’s, all at the same time. The 15 amp IOTA can handle the 10 amp load just fine.
As you can see in the photo above, which I didn’t think to take until after I ripped the face off the Tripp-Lite, and I’ll get to why in a moment, there is a big size difference between the Tripp-Lite and the comparatively puny IOTA. Since, for obvious reasons, I will not be using the recovered space there in what amounts to an electrical compartment for extra storage, the size difference is not a big gain for me, but the Tripp-Lite has a really big transformer and equally big bits and pieces which makes it tip the scales at over 40 pounds. The IOTA doesn’t quite get the needle up to 5 pound mark, saving me 35 pounds! Since, collectively, the cabinet doors I recently built (Cabinet Door Project) weigh in at a hair over 35 pounds it’s like I’m carrying them around for free now! (And I get a lot more use out of the cabinet doors than I did the Tripp-Lite!)
If you want to see the nuts-and-bolts of this equipment swap the full story is here:
The full story
(This photo is looking down into the electrical compartment under the gaucho. The cushion and house batteries have been removed for now)
OK, so yeah, this is probably not the kind of re-power all you gear-heads were thinking about, but The Van, and I, feel a lot better now that I’ve pulled the $650 Tripp-Lite Inverter/Charger, that silver ribbed box in the lower left, with its 2000 Watts of inverter power and 50 amps of charge current
and replaced it with this $150, 15 amp IOTA Converter with IQ4 charge controller.
Some of y'all are going to shake your heads and wonder just what this fool is thinking, going backwards like that! And that's understandable.
But think of it in terms of a couple owning a 5-bedroom/5 ½ bath house that they only use a fraction of; oh, and by the way, the furnace needs replacing. Now think of them selling that house and replacing it with a 1 bedroom/1 bath + den bungalow that they use every room of. Setting aside all that ‘Great American Dream’ stuff that Madison Avenue has indoctrinated us with since birth, is that really going backwards, or is it intelligent asset and resource management??
OK, regardless of what you think about that scenario, before I get to the nuts and bolts of actually making the equipment switch let me run down my reasoning here. It might not change your opinion of how many marbles my jar still holds, but then again, who knows. . .
True, by giving up the Tripp-Lite inverter I no longer have access to 120V power when not hooked up to shore-power; but then again I hardly ever used the inverter anyway. In fact the inverter had far more time on it from the 15 minute monthly test/exercise it got than it ever had for real. Oh, and by the way, (See how I cleverly repeated that phrase from a couple paragra - - Oh never mind. . .) during one of those monthly tests I discovered that the inverter had failed. (Which is exactly why I’m a stickler about regular tests of things not often used. Find out before you need it!) This failure was disappointing given how few hours the inverter had been run in its 4 years of active life (Yep, a year out of warranty!) but since I didn’t use it anyway, no big deal; except that I began to suspect that the dead inverter was bleeding off a few of my incoming shore-power volts. (I won’t get into the guts of how inverters like this work other than to point out that shore-power has to be processed by the inverter before it’s passed on to the rest of the electrical system and I’m not sure all of it was being passed on.)
True, by replacing a 50 amp charger (The charger portion of the Tripp-Lite continued to work after the inverter failed.) with a puny 15 amp charger it’s going to take a bit longer to recover from a deep, or even moderate, discharge state; but, with 180 watts of solar on the roof and modest usage I don’t get into a deep-discharge situation very often, and even so, whenever I plug into shore-power it’s going to be at least 12 hours before I unplug again, so what’s the rush? In fact, fast charges put more wear and tear on batteries than modest charges, yet even with the Tripp-Lite set to low-charge-current mode in an attempt to mitigate this fast-charge stress, it still output nearly 30 amps.
True, even throttled back to low-charge mode the Tripp-Lite could easily support almost 30 amps of prolonged 12V load; but my peak 12V load is more like 10 amps, and then only when I’m trying to get it up there by running the fridge, the fantastic vent fan on high, the overhead recessed lights (So bright I call them landing lights) charging up my laptop and plugging in the 100W inverter to charge some dead double-A’s, all at the same time. The 15 amp IOTA can handle the 10 amp load just fine.
As you can see in the photo above, which I didn’t think to take until after I ripped the face off the Tripp-Lite, and I’ll get to why in a moment, there is a big size difference between the Tripp-Lite and the comparatively puny IOTA. Since, for obvious reasons, I will not be using the recovered space there in what amounts to an electrical compartment for extra storage, the size difference is not a big gain for me, but the Tripp-Lite has a really big transformer and equally big bits and pieces which makes it tip the scales at over 40 pounds. The IOTA doesn’t quite get the needle up to 5 pound mark, saving me 35 pounds! Since, collectively, the cabinet doors I recently built (Cabinet Door Project) weigh in at a hair over 35 pounds it’s like I’m carrying them around for free now! (And I get a lot more use out of the cabinet doors than I did the Tripp-Lite!)
If you want to see the nuts-and-bolts of this equipment swap the full story is here:
The full story
